


Shorn of Their Illusion

by SullenSiren (lorax)



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: F/M, Yuletide, Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-08 14:09:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/76422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorax/pseuds/SullenSiren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seeing isn't always believing.  Derek loses faith, and maybe himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shorn of Their Illusion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crickets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crickets/gifts).



> Written for KC, aka [superduperkc](http://superduperkc.livejournal.com), who wanted Derek and Cameron, and no fluff. Hope this works for you! Title taken from "[, by Paul Hookham.](http://www.bartleby.com/236/374.html\\">A Meditation</a>)

**Shorn of Their Illusion**   
_"Returning, like a ghost unlaid,  
Until the debt I owe be paid.  
Forgive me, then; for I had been  
On friendly terms with this Machine:  
In him, while he was wont to trace  
Our roads, through many a long year's space,"  
\-- William Wordsworth, "The Waggoner"_

The machines are programmed to learn. Every day that passes, It watches. Learns. Grows. Derek watches and he sees the way John forgets, how Sarah accepts It as just another weapon in her arsenal.

Sarah Connor. John Connor. The names are close to sacred where Derek comes from. The patron saints of a broken world. The architects of hope. The John Derek had known was more than a soldier, he was a leader. A man of iron will and determination. The kind of man who never gave up. A man who could drive men to their finest because however hard he pushed, John always pushed himself further, demanded more of himself than of any of his soldiers. Sarah was a name on his lips and a few scattered pictures and remains. The pistol at John's hip had been hers. The order he cleaned his guns in a ritual handed down by her. For all that John was, he'd always said that Sarah was more.

In a world without fairy tales, it had been the closest to magic they had, the woman who went from waitress to the general that shaped John into humanity's great hope, the boy who grew into a man destined to lead in a broken world.

In a way, Derek hates John for sending him back. He hates that he has to see John as boy struggling to learn who he is, half terrified and half furious. Sometimes John seethes with resentment, and sometimes he drips with sadness. Once in a while, there's a flash of the man he'll be, but the more Derek watches for it, the harder it is to find. Sarah is even more difficult to watch. He sees the greatness in her, the steel in her spine, but that's all he ever expected to see. So the flashes of humanity, the moments of weakness and the bleak look she only lets escape when she thinks no one is watching, they all cut through in sharp relief like an image lit in lightning that he sees again and again, every time he shuts his eyes.

In Derek's future, all their hope comes from John, from faith that whatever happens they can weather it because they have John. It all rests on the belief that John is somehow more than the rest of them, and however many of them the metal cuts away, so long as there is John, there is hope.

John is Derek's faith and his guide. Even if there had been times when Derek thought he hated the bastard, John was always his leader, his idol, and his friend.

Now Derek sits at the dinner table while Sarah burns a meatloaf and John rolls his eyes and dials for pizza. Derek watches as It dips one shoulder, cants Its head so dark hair spills over the bare skin. He sees John's eyes slide and watch, follow the line of her throat to the swell of her breasts beneath the soft, pretty top she wears.

Derek hates It. Metal. Every moment since he awoke bleeding and half dead in Sarah's kitchen, he's watched and waited for some sign of It going bad. He hates them all; every single goddamned piece of metal walking around, killing off his race. But this one, this one he hates because John never, ever did. He hates It because it's beautiful and soft, and sometimes he'll watch John watch It, and then when Derek sleeps, he dreams of a burning sky, of people blowing away like paper in the wind. He dreams of It, naked and beautiful, splayed on a scorched earth, John between pale thighs and glowing blue eyes staring back at Derek as she twists John's neck. He hears the crack of bone and the crash of dreams as he bolts awake, achingly hard and almost sick with hate.

He doesn't want It.

He can't. It's not a person. Derek thinks of Jesse: beautiful and earthy and tenacious as a wolverine. He remembers days in cold underground bunkers, Jesse's legs like steel around his waist, body slick and warm around him, her back to the wall as she writhes, breathtaking and so very alive. Human, with the bruises and imperfections and scars that prove it. That's what Derek wants, but it's not what he dreams of.

Every time John's hand lingers on Its shoulder, every time It flashes a smile as John tries to explain a joke It can never understand. Every single time, Derek's hands curl into fists and he wants to tear John away. Fire a bullet into Its brain. Tell John that metal is _always_ metal, and It can never be a person. Never be what he needs It to be, and that the closer he gets to it, the more likely it is that It'll be close enough to turn on him.

It studies Derek like a puzzle It's trying to solve, and Derek tries not to speak to It. He tries not to see it, but the dreams lurk in his memory until he loses himself in them, and then he'll look up, and It'll be standing there, slim and beautiful, and he'll feel his eyes drop to slide over pale, perfect skin.

He doesn't want It.

He wants to fuck It. He tells himself that makes things different. It's not about sex. He wants to push inside, fuck It to pieces and pound into Its body until the metal shows and It looks hollow and inhuman. The way metal _should_ look. He tells himself that it's about the hate, not the sex, and for a while he can forgive himself. But he sees It dance. He sees her glide and stretch like poetry encased in skin, and the beauty eclipsed the metal, made it too real, or too unreal, since it made the lie of what she was that much closer to the truth. The long lines of her body flow like water, effortless and beautiful. Achingly, immeasurably, _humanly_ beautiful. The world Derek knows has no real beauty left, aside from the people who sometimes manage to shimmer and shine despite the dullness of their lives. He craves beauty.

The metal dances like a fallen star, shining bright and heart-breakingly beautiful. He stands, and he stares, and he wants to weep with the beauty of it. With the momentary thought that if It can do this, if it can be beautiful, do humans really have any more right to live than the metal does?

He shakes it off; pushes it to the back of his mind. Derek is a soldier. He does what needs to be done. He doesn't have time for existential dilemmas and moral quandaries.

But his dreams change. He dreams of dancing metal, dancing in lines like the chorus of the Nutcracker he remembers his mother taking him to see as a child. In front of it all is Cameron, graceful and beautiful, a living work of art that has never been, and never will be alive. But to his dreams, in never seems to matter.

He hates her for that, too.

He hates the way she watches him. Hates that if he looks just a little too hard, he can imagine a wealth of things in her empty eyes. Derek hates how very easy it would be to slip, and how as every day passes, he understands more and more how John can delude himself.

She follows him sometimes, smelling like a perfume he's caught drafts of on dozens of teenage girls drifting around the mall, their scent of choice a fact she can track and mimic. He hates that she follows, too. Because he knows why. John is her purpose. But Derek, he can be a learning experience. And when she's learned from him, Derek will have been one more lesson learned, one step toward letting John forget that she's not a person. That she's metal.

He still doesn't say no the night she drifts into his room. John is asleep down the hall, and Sarah is gone. Derek doesn't know where she's gone; Sarah keeps her secrets, still. He both admires that and chafes at it. He wants to tell her everything he's seen, everything he knows, everything he's afraid of. He wants to lay it all down and wait for guidance or benediction, because John is just a boy. But Sarah is too real, and she has her own problems, and Derek never, ever will.

Instead he watches as metal strips off its clothes, stands naked and beautiful in front of his bed. In his head, he sees the silhouette of her dancing again, searches for the glow of blue behind her eyes. He can't find it.

He lets her into his bed and hates himself, even as he's sliding inside her. There's no gentleness in him. He fucks her, brutal and fast. She feels as human inside as she looks on the outside, warm and wet , but her fingers leave bone deep bruises on his skin, and every move she makes is a beautiful lie, a triumph of illusion. He wonders if she's spent nights watching porn, preparing for this. Wonders if John, his John, the real John, has ever been here, watching her arch and stretch. Wonders if he's ever heard the utter silence and seen the too-steady gaze. He digs his fingers into her thigh, blunt nails drawing blood he pushes so hard, and she just stares and tightens around him.

He empties himself inside her, and chokes back a sob as she shudders beneath him, miming a release he knows she can't feel, but doing it well enough that if he hadn't known, if he'd just been a man who thought he was bedding a beautiful girl, he would have been fooled.

She slides out of bed as silently as she'd slid into it, presses her fingers between her legs to gather the slick evidence of his sin and rubbing it between her fingers, cocking her head at him. Derek looks away, burning with shame and want. He feels as if he's falling, tumbling without anything solid to cling to because Sarah is just a mother protecting her son, and John is just a boy, and metal feels like a woman when you fuck her.

"You're just a _thing_," he hisses, low and harsh.

She tosses her hair, the way the first girl he ever kissed used to, and she smiles, thin and small. When he looks at her, it looks empty. He blinks, and suddenly it seems sad, and he wants to be sick because he can't remember which is real, for a moment.

"We're all just things," she answers.

She pulls her clothes on and leaves, boots dangling delicately from iron-strong fingertips, scent of her perfume still on his pillows, in his sheets. His cock throbs and his eyes sting, and Derek misses his world of death and ruin because there things were, at least, simple.

She'll come back tomorrow, he knows. He doesn't know why, but he knows she will. She has some agenda. They always have an agenda. Derek knows that. He knows he'll let her in anyway, too. He'll tell himself he has his reasons. If John knows, he won't want her anymore. He'll claim it's for his own agenda.

It's a lie. But sometimes faith in the lies is what gets you through. The lie of John Connor, the lie of Sarah Connor, they've been taken away from him. The only lies he has left now are his own.

~~~


End file.
